


Last Thoughts

by 94BottlesOfSnapple



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s01e13 The Parting of the Ways, F/M, Internal Monologue, POV The Doctor (Doctor Who), Purple Prose, Regeneration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-17
Updated: 2017-10-17
Packaged: 2019-01-18 12:43:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12388314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/94BottlesOfSnapple/pseuds/94BottlesOfSnapple
Summary: A rehashing of Nine's final moments, through his eyes.





	Last Thoughts

He’d never thought… Never meant…

The point was, he hadn’t paused to consider regeneration because right there, right then, who he was with Rose Tyler, that was the man the Doctor most wanted to be. With his aching burden, with his people and his crimes all lifted away from their smothering position on his hearts by two small but sturdy shoulders. Where he could be a daft old coward who smiled like he was too proud of himself, clever enough to keep Rose safe and make her eyes glow like little twin suns in her face.

Until suddenly that was exactly what they were.

And because he was that man, he’d have done anything, anything to save her. Without Rose Tyler, the Doctor was not who or where he wanted to be. And she had saved him then, burning like a vengeful goddess. Fear and a desperate, foolish love tangled in his hearts – both fit to burst from his chest. She was beautiful and terrible in that moment; painfully human even drowning in the throes of infinite power – still his Rose. And a sob hitched in the Doctor’s throat because he knew even as she saved him that he was going to die to return the favor.

The Time Vortex pulsing a four-beat rhythm in Rose’s veins was bursting from her skin and her hair and her eyes and there were no longer Daleks where once there were, and the Doctor could feel with a shudder down his spine the way Jack Harkness gasped back into life. Everything was too quiet and too loud at once, the universe melting around them. The Doctor was begging for Rose to stop because he could see how tenuous and thin she was, stretched over the enormity of time. He was shouting loud enough to feel the pleas rasp in his throat like shards of glass.

But it didn’t matter, nothing mattered except the way the dark fury escaped Rose like air from a balloon.

“I can see everything,” she told him with half a sob. “All that is, all that was, all that ever will be.”

There was a sound then, one he felt at the base of his skull instead of hearing through his ears, and it sounded like his hearts cracking in two. He couldn’t see her eyes past the golden light, but for the first time he thought she could truly understand everything about him. It was such a sublime agony, such a stunning prize – one not worth paying that high price for, not ever.

“That’s what I see,” he couldn’t help but to tell her, forcing a sound from his throat that wanted to be a laugh, for her sake, must be a laugh because it’d be the last she would see of him. “All the time. And doesn’t it drive you mad?”

She was already mad before, an impossible, ridiculous, exquisitely human girl.

“My head,” she complained then, voice soft. “It’s killing me.”

He surged forward to catch her as she stumbled, the expiration of her rage leaving her weak and dying in his arms. One, or both, of his hearts must have stopped beating then like putting a gun to each of their heads, and he smiled and pushed the feeling away as usual because he was a coward but fear had no place there, in a time and place where Rose was in his arms.

“I think,” he managed, “you need a doctor.”

Of course he could have done it some other way, it was true, but he was daft and selfish and he just needed that – to have kissed her, while he was still himself, while he was still the Doctor who first met Rose Tyler. It was something he could never have brought himself to do, for all that she looked at him so often like she honestly wouldn’t have minded. The way she had smiled at him, tongue tucked between her teeth, the way she’d asked him if he _danced_ , with that teasing, flirty sort of emphasis. The way she’d laced her fingers through his. He was going to die, or regenerate, and everything he had to give would be worth Rose but he just…

And wasn’t it so like a fairytale, he wondered. True love’s kiss saves the day. They’d been saving each other all along. From danger, from loneliness, from the confines of time and space. He’d tried to save her already, by sending her away. Back to her Mum, back to Mickey the Idiot, back to her life in London where she could’ve forgotten him and lived a happy little human life. But she’d come back, golden and glowing, Bad Wolf, and she’d turned it all around. She’d saved him instead.

He was going to save her one last time, because there was nothing else he could even consider doing, but it would be with a kiss instead of a goodbye.

And pressing his lips to hers was the most perfect and painful thing the Doctor had ever done; trying to focus on her soft, lovely mouth with time burning through him right to his very cells. It was the first and last kiss he’d ever have with Rose Tyler, and it was something he’d always hated, when firsts and lasts were at the same time. There were so many places he’d wanted to take her, and so many things he’d still wanted to say, things that needed time. So many smiles and laughs and kisses that would never happen. Or, if they would, with some other Doctor, one with a new face.

But seeing her chest rise and fall with a steady, living breath… That loss was nothing. She was alive. He would not have to endure a world without Rose Tyler.

The strength to carry her into the TARDIS was impossible but there, aided by the cold, instinctive fear in his belly that came from Jack, a floor below them – a living fixed point, a fixed point that could chase them through time and space, a fixed point Rose had created. Time Agent, his mind supplied for him as he settled Rose onto the floor of the console room. Jack had been a Time Agent, he would be fine without the Doctor. He still had a vortex manipulator, didn’t he? The TARDIS was just as repelled as he was, anyway – she wouldn’t let Jack on. She’d try to get away.

They were all excuses. Maybe even bad ones. Jack was important – to both of them, the Doctor and Rose. Jack was…

And when the Doctor turned back for a single moment, desperate and determined, the ill lurching – wrong, wrong, wrong, a feeling like the cloister bell’s ringing vibrating through his chest – returned to knock his willpower away. He placed Rose on the console room floor and locked the TARDIS doors.

His shaking hands adjusted dials and pulled levers, lava shot through his arms, and for a moment the Doctor thought Rose wouldn’t be conscious to see him change. Would she panic, in the TARDIS with a stranger’s face looking back at her? Would she, could she, ever believe he was her Doctor, who loved her?

And he would be the Doctor, the same Doctor, but he wouldn’t at all. He was clever, but never much of a Time Lord, not really. And that meant that he had very little control over who or what he became. Like when they tell you as a child that you can grow up to be anything. They don’t mean it, not really, but he could be. He could regenerate into anyone. Even with the same memories, nothing would ever be the same. He knew it with unending, aching certainty. He’d been so many things in 900 years, so many people, all with the same memories and the same two beating hearts.

 

Rose wakes.

 

And the Doctor knows he loves her so fiercely it couldn’t possibly change with this regeneration because the alternative is too horrific to consider. But anything else is up for grabs, anything else could change.

He jokes about it with her, because she doesn’t remember so what else can he do? Will she even recall that kiss someday? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if he wants her to. _I sang a song and the Daleks ran away_ , like it was all a dream, like there’s nothing for Rose to fear, not ever, not even Daleks. He laments Barcelona, it was a good joke and they would have laughed. He even jokes about the regeneration – _two heads, no head, don’t say that’d be an improvement_ – but the fear is so bitingly cold that it even numbs the pain of having absorbed the entirety of the Time Vortex itself. He’s so terrified that he can’t even feel his body collapsing around him, cell by cell, though he knows it is. Has to be. His frame jerks and he lets out a pained shout. She steps forward, but he can’t have her near him, can’t risk her getting hurt, so he yells at her to get back. It’s hard not to just screw his face up in pain and ride it out like that. But he beams anyway, brightly, desperately.

“You were fantastic,” he tells her in the end, knowing that isn’t quite what he wanted to say but that it’s too late to say what he means. “Absolutely fantastic.”

The look on her face isn’t fond or happy, though, it’s confused, blank. Rose doesn’t understand. She doesn’t realize that this is the last time he’ll see her face with these blue eyes. Rose Tyler is rejecting what’s happening before her. She looks worried, and he doesn’t want to – can’t bring himself to – leave until she smiles. As his fear recedes to make room for that wish, the Doctor’s pain returns in full force, thawed, nearly doubling him over.

“And you know what?” he asks, breathless and dying and pleading for that smile, tipping his head in the jaunty way he knows she likes. “So was I.”

Even as tears streak her face, he sees the quick white flash of Rose’s teeth and that’s enough. He doesn’t want to go but he can, even as he’s so, so afraid.

And what the Doctor wishes as he grins at her one last time, as every atom of his body rips apart in a flare of fiery light, is this: that whatever it is or was, whatever mistake of being, whatever in his face or his eyes, in his manner or posture or voice, whatever had made Rose Tyler love him, that it still be with him when the change is done.


End file.
